DANGERLAND!

In a Las Vegas gated community, love and marriage are often at odds, with money doing its share to gum up the works.

Singer’s very funny, latter-day Jane Austen-esque debut revolves around a pair of characters with a distinctive meet-cute in their distant past. In 1979, 9-year-old Kurt Richter’s older half brother showed up to babysit with a teenage girlfriend named Eugenie Zepp in tow. Eugenie is quickly revealed to be the love of young Kurt’s life, but destiny is never on their side. By 2024, Eugenie is the No. 1 realtor in an elite Vegas exurb called Alluvian, now divorced and living with her adult son, Austin. Kurt, the developer of Alluvian, has two ex-wives and the most constant figure in his children’s lives is their nanny, Janelle Borshowa, a hardy Canadian girl Kurt met on a hunting trip. Some locals believe he killed his first wife and buried her on the erstwhile golf course of which their homes once had verdant views; it’s now an arid wasteland where Kurt is trying to get permits to build condominium towers. Much other drama surrounds these characters, their neighbors, and their offspring, maybe a little too much: Singer’s appetite for inventing hilarious complications runs at top speed right into the final pages, and her more-is-more sensibility manifests even at the sentence level, where the throughline zooms around like a silver ball released in a pinball machine. For example: “Eugenie Zepp wasn’t stupid or even naïve, but when it came to picking suitable dudes, it was like she said Hold my beer to her adult brain and let the high school girl in her take the wheel. Eugenie Zepp’s type was the eighties-style toxic male too afraid to face his own mortality, whereas Austin’s generation had learned to live with doom after their first active-shooter drill in preschool.” Overstuffed, yes. Gaudy, even. And totally Las Vegan, if you think about it—the capital of more is more; surely the author agrees with the sentiment she gives to Eugenie: “There wasn’t a thing she didn’t love about Las Vegas.”

A promising—if somewhat exhausting—debut by a writer with energetic comic gifts.